Nonplused, Oliveri summoned maintenance workers, who puzzled how the jokers moved the booth from the basement to the 148-foot-high peak.

When the workers crept along the limestone roof to within earshot of the booth, they heard the phone ringing. The call was for them.

``They did a good job with that one,`` chuckled Oliveri, the campus police chief. ``The workers picked up the receiver and it stopped ringing.``

While telephone booth stuffing and streaking have, for the most part, gone the way of Hula-Hoops and panty raids, tradition keeps alive the art of pranksterism on campuses coast-to-coast. Unlike MIT, where students often apply high-tech class work to their extracurricular mischief, gags at other schools tend to involve traditional rivalries or fraternity initiations.

At Harvard, two editors of the campus newspaper were arrested last year when police spotted one of them rappelling from the 60-foot brick and copper dome of the Harvard Lampoon building. They were trying to steal a 4-foot copper statue of a bird known as Ibis in retaliation for the theft by Lampoon staffers of portraits of former newspaper editors.

Other pranks at Harvard have been perpetrated by students from Ivy League rival Dartmouth College against a statue of founder John Harvard. Once, they painted him green, the Dartmouth school color. Another time, the figure of a rodent was welded to his finger.

At Amherst College, students swiped a 4-foot bronze statue of a seductive nymph, known as Sabrina, so often that college officials tried hiding her in an isolated barn. But several alumni nabbed her in 1983. The statue was last seen during a lacrosse game between Amherst and Williams College -- hanging by a rope from a helicopter that flew overhead.

At MIT, officials won`t take action against students unless they go too far. Therefore, bigger and better high jinks are a matter of school pride. Oliveri has photographs of some of the pranks on his office walls and the university museum has a 6-inch thick file of such pranks, which MIT calls ``hacks.`` No one is sure how the term originated, but it is believed to be derived from ``hacking`` -- which means to work furiously at something. The term has recently evolved into computer mischief.

One of the earliest MIT hacks, in 1958, involved measuring the nearby Harvard Bridge, which spans the Charles River.

Fraternity brothers sized the bridge in ``Smoots,`` using the 5-foot-6 body of Oliver R. Smoot Jr. -- their shortest pledge -- as a measuring stick. The bridge was 364.4 ``Smoots`` long, plus an ear. Each year since, fraternity members re-enact the measuring and re-mark each ``Smoot.``

The MIT dome is a frequent target for things other than phone booths. Plastic and live cows, automobiles and various other items have made their way aloft over the years.

One of the most famous hacks occurred last year in the midst of the Harvard-Yale football game. Members of MIT`s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity triggered a complex device that unleashed a 6-foot weather balloon through the turf at the 46-yard line in Harvard Stadium. The balloon billowed full of gas to display ``MIT`` in white letters, and some members of the capacity crowd were dusted with the white powder used to lubricate the device.

This fall, officials at a Sheraton hotel in Boston found all the lights on their neon sign had been shut off except for the ``ATO`` section -- presumably the work of MIT`s Alpha Tau Omega.

Some pranks have gone too far: welding shut the gate to famed Harvard Yard; greasing the rails of a subway stop near campus, and one incident in which a trolley reportedly was welded to the tracks.

When it comes to ingenuity, MIT students are rivaled by their counterparts at the California Institute of Technology, another school known for its engineering program. Last year, CalTech students took control of the electronic scoreboard during the nationally televised Rose Bowl and, at one point, replaced the names of the opposing teams with ``MIT`` and ``CalTech.``

The MIT tradition of pranksterism spawned formation in 1980 of an unofficial student organization called the Technology Hackers Association, which seeks out new members with the most outlandish ideas. One, in 1983, transformed a large radar dome atop a 22-story campus building into a giant bright yellow happy face.

The group`s main activity is exploring MIT`s ancient buildings to find new and secretive ways of gaining entrance to facilitate their gags.

Members once rigged a remote-control device that released 9,600 pink and green pingpong balls at 13 balls per second from a skylight at the top of a four-story campus rotunda.

``There`s a lot of technically creative people in the same place and a lot of pressure from school,`` said one association member. ``People just want to do something crazy and different. Since they`re talented in the engineering field, that`s just the way it gets expressed.``